Abstract
Coercive power has different effects on individuals, and which were unable to be fully addressed in Milgram’s famous studies on obedience to authority. While some individuals exhibited high levels of guilt-related anxiety and refused orders to harm, others followed coercive orders throughout the whole event. The lack of guilt is a well-known characteristic of psychopathy, and recent evidence portrays psychopathic personalities on a continuum of clustered traits, while being pervasive in a significant proportion in the population. To investigate whether psychopathic traits better explain discrepancies in antisocial behavior under coercion, we applied a virtual obedience paradigm, in which an experimenter ordered subjects to press a handheld button to initiate successive actions that carry different moral consequences, during fMRI scanning. Psychopathic traits modulated the association between harming actions and guilt feelings on both behavioral and brain levels. This study sheds light on the individual variability in response to coercive power.
Highlights
Coercive power has different effects on individuals, and which were unable to be fully addressed in Milgram’s famous studies on obedience to authority
While we found an overall trend between shorter reaction time (RT) and stronger guilt ratings, this association might vary as a function of psychopathic traits
The present study addresses the link between neural correlates of guilt and psychopathic traits
Summary
Coercive power has different effects on individuals, and which were unable to be fully addressed in Milgram’s famous studies on obedience to authority. One famous example of the latter, and his trial took place several years later in Jerusalem, was that of Adolf Eichmann His lack of remorse and guilt was cemented on the excuse that he was “just obeying orders”, with his motivations being solely those of climbing up the economic, social, and political ladder. All shallow goals considering the horrors he had to commit in order to reach them, and by which Hannah Arendt coined the famous phrase “the banality of evil”[4] These observed differences spark the question of whether this wide spectrum of individual differences can predict the outcomes of decision-making under coercion better than social context, or in other words, how individuals decide whether to obey an order issued by an authoritative figure that causes direct harm to others. As the presence of guilt cannot deter all antisocial behavior, and the lack of guilt can still produce moral actions, it is very likely that the relationships between guilt, psychopathic traits, and antisocial behavior is highly complex and worth exploring
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